IDPM Archived Publications
Community Conservation in Africa: Working Papers
The Nature of Benefits and the Benefits of Nature: Why Wildlife Conservation has not Economically Benefited Communities in Africa
Lucy Emerton
Abstract
Community-oriented approaches to wildlife conservation usually have a strong economic rationale. They are typically based on the premise that if local people participate in wildlife management and economically benefit from this participation, then a "win-win" situation will arise whereby wildlife is conserved at the same time as community welfare improves. While most community conservation activities have the ultimate goal of maintaining wildlife populations, they simultaneously aim to improve the socio-economic status of human communities in wildlife areas.
This paper will describe how most attempts to conserve wildlife carried out in East and southern Africa over the last decade have been at least partially based on this economic rationale. In order to achieve the joint ends of conservation and human welfare improvement such projects and programmes have followed a common approach to generating economic benefits for the people who live in wildlife areas. In combination with other forms of local participation in wildlife management, benefits have tended to be provided by returning a proportion of the revenues earned by the state from wildlife back to them through indirect benefit-sharing arrangements and grass-roots development activities mainly the provision of social infrastructure such as schools, water supplies and health facilities.
The economic rationale behind such benefit-based approaches to community conservation that communities must benefit from wildlife if they are to be willing and able to conserve it is sound. It constitutes a major advance from traditional exclusionist approaches to wildlife conservation which were largely based on denying community access and gain from wildlife, and has undoubtedly resulted in the more equitable distribution of wildlife benefits. This paper will however argue that such benefit-based models are based on an incomplete understanding of the economics of community conservation and of the nature of wildlife beneifts. Over the long term they may lead neither to community welfare improvement nor contribute to wildlife conservation.
Benefit distribution is a necessary, but in itself may not be a sufficient, condition for communities to engage in wildlife conservation. Whether or not communities have economic incentives to conserve wildlife, and whether or not they are economically better off in the presence of wildlife, goes far beyond ensuring that a proportion of wildlife revenues are returned to them as broad development or social infrastructure benefits. It also depends on the economic costs that wildlife incurs, on the form in which wildlife benefits are received, on the costs and benefits of other economic activities which compete with wildlife and on a range of external factors which all limit the extent to which communities are able to appropriate wildlife benefits as real livelihood gains. Community incentives to conserve wildlife, and the conditions they depend on, vary at different times for different people. Additional economic considerations need to be incorporated into community approaches to wildlife conservation, and form a part of whether such approaches can be judged to have been successful in development and conservation terms.
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